26 The Future Poetry
because its principle of expression has not got far enough away
from the principle of prose expression. It seems to forget that
while the first aim of prose style is to define and fix an object,
fact, feeling, thought before the appreciating intelligence with
whatever clearness, power, richness or other beauty of presen-
tation may be added to that essential aim, the first aim of poetic
style is to make the thing presented living to the imaginative
vision, the responsive inner emotion, the spiritual sense, the
soul-feeling and soul-sight. Where the failure is to express at
all with any sufficient power, to get home in any way, the dis-
tinction becomes palpable enough, and we readily say of such
writings that this is verse but not poetry. But where there is some
thought-power or other worth of substance attended with some
power of expression, false values more easily become current
and even a whole literary age may dwell on this borderland
or be misled into an undue exaltation and cult for this half-
poetry.
Poetry, like the kindred arts of painting, sculpture, architec-
ture, appeals to the spirit of man through significant images, and
it makes no essential difference that in this case the image is men-
tal and verbal and not material. The essential power of the poetic
word is to make us see, not to make us think or feel; thought and
feeling^1 must arise out of the sight or be included in it, but sight
is the primary consequence and power of poetic speech. For the
poet has to make us live in the soul and in the inner mind and
heart what is ordinarily lived in the outer mind and the senses,
and for that he must first make us see by the soul, in its light
and with its deeper vision, what we ordinarily see in a more
limited and halting fashion by the senses and the intelligence.
He is, as the ancients knew, a seer and not merely a maker of
rhymes, not merely a jongleur, rhapsodist or troubadour, and not
merely a thinker in lines and stanzas. He sees beyond the sight
of the surface mind and finds the revealing word, not merely the
adequate and effective, but the illumined and illuminating, the
(^1) I speak here of the outer emotional or sensational feeling, not of the spiritual sense
and soul-stir which is the invariable concomitant of the soul’s sight.